So, Brian’s 70-year-old dad took on GTA IV and took quite a liking to it. Others his age are not as enlightened or — shocker — willing to try new things, and so the series might require further explication.
Helpfully, here is a FAQ (a FAQ? an F-A-Q? how do I do this) from 23/6 to break down the choices and consequences and action and intrigue that make all the young folk shine shoes and save up their penny-candy money to buy it.
And to wrap things up today, here’s “The ABCs of Gaming,” from a T-shirt design contest at Shirt.woot.com. The contest closed this week. The latest on the site shows another shirt claiming 2nd place in this derby so, who knows, maybe it won. I’m sure the ordering information will follow.
For now, take a long look and see if you can name all 26. I can name about 19 offhand. There’s a spoiler solution after the jump.
1Up has a running feature on worst-ever box cover art. It’s been about six months since the last installation so they drop another dozen or so for us to laugh at. Yes, Okami’s watermarked box makes the list. So does the Orange Box. Remember, just because it’s bad box doesn’t make it a bad game. In fact, a good game triumphing over bad packaging is … even gooder!
Some of these are so bad they look like LOLz. Utterly incongruous text over the graphics. Like someone developed a game and then they retrofit whatever art was laying around because they ran out the packaging budget. Pure Pinball? That looks more like a concept for Fox Force Five or something.
Reader Dead Hex found this — apparently it was posted in mid-April and we missed it? But it’s a concept video that dares asks the question, what if Nintendo developed Halo 3?
Oh, most of the punchlines are predictable stereotypes (you see, Nintendo develops games like this and Microsoft develops games like this) but, c’mon, some of it’s pretty clever. Especially the final level. And the aerial combat. As soon as they take off, I was waiting for Starfox and … yep, it doesn’t disappoint.
Gal, Guy and Villain [Major League Gaming, via Typing Loudly, thanks Dead Hex.]
We’ve mentioned the Russian RTS Stalin vs. Martians, which is set in Siberia circa 1942 and features the Red Army versus … martians. Kieron Gillen has posted a funny interview with Alexander Shcherbakov, the lead creator, over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which features tantalising hints at future projects (A game featuring Lenin? A winter add-on pack for Stalin vs. Martians?), as well as some generally gaming related chatter:
Slate contributor Sudhir Venkatesh is a Columbia sociology professor who has written a book about street gangs, even going so far as to run with one in Chicago for a book. So, naturally, Grand Theft Auto IV would intrigue him. His verdict on the game’s realism? It “actually offered a less sensational portrait of gangland and ghetto streets than the one put out by most cops, politicians, policymakers, and even academics.”
But it does pretty much nail the always changing landscape of a criminal’s life, in enemies who become friends and vice versa, risks taken trusting someone and goals that were of vital importance at one point becoming expendable in short time.
While academia occasionally manages to maintain the veneer of being ‘civilised,’ academic battles of words can frequently be just as epic as anything occurring outside the Ivory Tower — even when couched in elegant language and well-reasoned points, you can tell people are out to draw blood. So it (sort of) is with Roger Travis, a classics professor who wrote a passionate plea for gamers to “turn the tables on Aarseth and other doyens of game studies” in the Escapist:
Age of Conan is going after World of Warcraft in the MMO space. It’s also a vehicle for getting those hot babes Roy Thomas drew in Savage Sword of Conan into 3D animation. Seriously, the Conan franchise’s sensuous representation of bodies in combat is absolutely one of its drawing cards, acknowledged or not. So developer Funcom has gone to it with gusto, looks like.
GamesRadar has two videos up of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, which releases for the PC on May 20. It’s due for Xbox 360 sometime by September. The first shows combat and the character classes, with some dry narration about succubus boobies and a not-really apology if anyone’s offended. The second covers the dungeon crawl.
Edit: I tried to embed these but it dint work the thang’s broked stupid embed code etc. Best to just visit the GamesRadar site. They’re still pretty slick to watch.
Two Exclusive Age of Conan Videos [GamesRadar]
Adding to my theory that Three Kingdoms-related material will outlast us all, Dynasty Gaming has announced the start of closed testing with the first of their Sega-licensed “China Series” of games. And what would that game be? A MMORPG entitled Sanguko Seisen (‘Saga of the Three Kingdoms’), designed to “secure a loyal following of SEGA game enthusiasts in China.” Considering the current success of domestically-produced titles, it seems a little late to be trying to secure a ‘loyal following,’ but people do love their Three Kingdoms related stuff. Full release after the jump:
So I poked the console-wars snake last week and learned a big Fat Albert lesson about people’s feelings in the process. Gametrailers, with a longer history than me, not so much.
We’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about how they botched a comparison video of Race Driver: GRID. In an attempt to show cooler crash physics on the 360, they used PS3′s instead — easily identifiable by the controller map in the lower left corner. Doh!
Gametrailers took down the video after getting barbecued in the comment flamewar. But someone already YouTubed it and spliced in comments pointing out the negligence, or worse.
Anyway, here you go. Just shows that console comparison is absolutely the third rail discussion in our neck of the woods. And if you undertake it, everything has to be bulletproof, or you’ll get ripped for looking like a shill.
